Over the years I have noticed an annoying trend in using this blog wholesale as part of other sites and blogs. There is probably a name for this - syndication? - however this would suggest my consent but as I haven't been asked or given it its just plain old piracy. I'm not even sure if these sites are real and not just run by robot programmes trawling the net for content.
The first site where this happened was Planet Die-Cast.
The latest site where I have found one of my own articles is the Aquarius Project, whilst browsing for a UFO fact. There is no mention of my name as the author. The whole site looks quite bizarre and sort of pretend.
Have you any experience of this outright duplication of blogged articles readers?
That's not syndication. Syndication is the word for something else altogether -- what Google Reader used to do, and services like Feedly do now, is syndication. It lets people see when new posts have gone up on a blog and lets them read those posts at the originating blog, or in a separate application specially designed for reading blog posts. That's not what this is. What you're talking about here is straight up content theft or plagiarism, and I suspect you're right that it's automated rather than human. It used to happen to me all the time when I was actively blogging. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do to stop this practice, sorry to say, but I don't think it caused me any loss because anyone who wanted to read my writing could find the real thing easily enough. The same is true here.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that Richard. I understand it better now. The sites do seem robotic to me. It is a pain but I suppose currently its harmless. Why do they bother?
DeleteYeah, there are a couple of other sites that seem to use my posts on a regular basis. What I hate is that the layout is usually terrible and makes the posts look amateurish.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean Kid. They look naff.
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